The World of Osmanovic Harun @theworldofoh - Tumblr Blog

Texte d’inspiration ducassienne

Sur le plancher et, en position semi-verticale, sur la paroi, respectivement de l'utricule et du saccule, la poussière d'oreille s'était accumulée. Un fois retirés, les antiques otolithes sagittaux de la sébaste atlantique furent déposés, non pas pêle-mêle mais minutieusement, pour ne pas en fausser l'ageage, sur la table de dissection, tout près de la machine à coudre. La cochlée quand à elle, creuse et dégoulinante d'endolymphe, resta, à la manière d'un coq wyandotte, Mike de son prénom, animée pendant de longues heures. Sans explication apparente, les stéréocils, groupés en une touffe ciliaire, qui tapissent ce limaçon, demeuraient libres de vibrer. L'on eut même cru que la sébaste, crue encore, entendait le pieds à l'étrier par la fenêtre ovale du vestibule.

#isidorducasse #comte de lautreamont #lautreamont #chants de maldoror #maldoror #literature #litterature #langue française #isidor ducasse

Brel, That Poet!

A text I wrote for Discover Benelux some time ago - the original is here (link) the longer version is below.

-------------------------------------------------------- Brel, that poet ! It was a weekday of the month of April, I'm at my parents'house in the French Provence... sometimes I go there to work... the props of writing for a living. I'm sitting by the window looking at the sky, lazying about and stressing over a piece « in the pipeline », when the telephone rings. I pick it up right before my mom : - Oui, âllo ? - Âllo, Harun ? C'est France à l'appareil. It was Brel's daughter on the line. She called me at my parents' house, used my first name and it just felt like we knew each other for years. « I can't speak at the set time, » France said, she was with students interested in Brel's writing, and wanted to know if it was okay to postpone some thirty minutes... of course it was! I was restlessly waiting for her call, thinking of the right questions, she probably had them all before... I had to convey Brel's genius to non-French speakers... talk about a mission! I thought if only I could translate some of his lyrics, it would suffice in showing the literary strength of Brel.

« And then... and then... and then there's Frida Who's pretty like the sun Who's love for me is the same As my own love for Frida » Cross that. It doesn't sound right. Maybe this: « Who's pretty like sunshine And who loves me like I Yes like I love Frida » Not quite. It is crooked. Too much is lost in translation. Brel's text is precise, it is mathematics. « Racontent » rhymes with « compte » like two plus two equal four. It couldn't have been otherwise. In Ces gens là people aren't speaking with each other, they're not recounting anything, too worried about the money, all they do is count. One can explain that, it's not hard to understand, but how do you translate it in a five or six syllables rhyme? It's doomed to fail like trying to recreate the incipit of Nabokov's Lolita, or describing the chiaroscuro in a painting by the Caravaggio to a totally blind friend. We humans are limited and often have to live with our frustrations. The translation of Le port d'Amsterdam, to Mort Shuman, must have been an exhausting entreprise... full of disappointment. Of course he did a fine job, the best anybody could have done, but something is missing from the English version... not quite sure what. The « fly » is there but the « rancid » accordion isn't, the « oriflamme » has been forgotten too, and so has the « heart of fries ». But the main loss in translation ?« Ocean languors »? Perhaps. This is probably it. Shuman's version hasn't got any « languor » whereas Brel paints Amsterdam, in his entire song, as slumberful and langourous... submerged in a thick heat. So thick is the heat that one could easily taste it, it stays pasted to the tongue. Maybe this is why, in the only version of Amsterdam, a live clip of Brel gleamingly sweating his glee, the great Belgian sticks the tip of his tongue out on the « n » of océanes ! To show the crowd the evidence that what he's interpreting before them is the truth. « Brel doesn't interpret, » a friend of mine once told me, « he paints. » Each one of his song is a fresco with its amazing landscapes in the back, the detailed portraits of his characters, the modest interiors, the rough texture of a fatherly moustache, but also the sounds and smells – the slurps of Those folks eating soup or the house of The elders which smells of thyme and of the language of yesteryear.This is my Brel, but there are many of him... in fact there are as many Jacques Brels as people listening to him ; between the ears of men and women across the globe is where Brel is found.With France and her husband Francis we shared some brelian anecdotes. « Some time ago we went back to the old building where Brel used to live in his youth, explains Francis, and we met an old man from Africa, he's walking out the building with his cane, painfully, marked by the time that never stops. We asked him if we can take some pictures... when he realised who we were, he told us 'you can do whatever you like, Brel taught me French' .» Those stories go by the dozen... I have a friend in Algeria who's father owns a textile brand. For the longest time, in our youth, we wondered what he named the brand after... it is only recently that we realized it was after the iconic Frida in Brel's songs. That's how global his impact was. His song Vesoul has been translated in tens of languages and counts over 100 covers. The main reason behind such a success might be the sincerity of his enterprise... he loved the common man, and when everyone else tried to embellish life, he worked at rendering a more truthful and real image, full of happiness sometimes, but also despair very often. He was an observer and understood the beauty of everyday life.He was obsessed by time passing. Surely that must have motivated him to stay a little longer with us... in posterity.

#jacquesbrel #brel #poetry #literature #Mort Shuman #jacques brel #translation #lost in translation #le port d'amsterdam #discover benelux #harun osmanovic

Street life and its game

My following piece was originally published in the December issue of Discover Benelux. Read in original context here I am a hunter. Not in the traditional sense as I have never killed an animal in my life, but the fact remains: I hunt. The city is my playground and it isn’t without a certain pride that I claim to have trained my eyes to detect the gems hidden in its intricate labyrinthal streets. Below the curb I do bend, up on the roof I look, I roam the macadam camera in hand ready to shoot, and when I see game I aim and… click. (here for street art pictures) Boom! It’s captured. People often mistake art in the street with the art movement that is labelled street-art. For instance a statue by Dali is art in the street, but it might be surrealism, not street-art. On my last visit to Amsterdam, the hunt was not fruitful quantitatively, but the quality was exquisite.

First, in Duifjessteeg, a narrow alley right off of the Rokin, just next to the street sign, there on the wall, a face coming out. A Passer-through-walls is taking a peek, but not Marcel Aymé’s Passe-muraille, like statufied in Montmartre by Jean Marais. No, I’d say the piece could be by Gregos, the Frenchman casting his face and placing it on walls around the world, or maybe by an affiliate of Urbansolid, the Italian street-art collective. Or maybe not! One of the beauty of the hunt resides in this. Sometimes it can take ages before you find a clue about the artist’s identity. But not my next piece. In fact they came in pairs near one of the Bulldog Cafés in Amsterdam. First this candid little drawing of three kids captivated. They are sitting in mid-air, their shadows cast on the wall as they look at us in the street just like we look at them, except from the fact that when we look, a smile enlightens our faces, but not theirs, what they see seems to preoccupy them, which in return preoccupies me because what they see is us. The piece is signed: Alicè for Alice Pasquini, with a dynamic tittle on the “i” written à la va vite, as if Alice got caught right as she was finishing her work and ran away stretching the dot into a horizontal line.

And finally, the masterpiece of the show, in this improvised gallery, a portrait of an old man looking at me, his eyes straight on me, his face three quarter profile. The work could have been left unsigned, Christian Guémy’s little logo, a cube carrying his spray-can name C215, could have been forgotten without harming our capacity to recognize the artist’s DNA. The portrait is entirely done with stencils, and though the technique almost always results in flat design without shadow or relief, Mr Guémy’s work has incredible depth. The riddles on the man’s face, I presume a homeless man, are palpable, his beard almost sticks out of the blue wall, and the woolly texture of the pullover make me envy the fellow on this autumn day in Amsterdam. I touch the wall just there, as a kid touches a hot stove, ‘tis cold. The painting was done over paste-ups and posters which are being torn off. The wall bears scratches, the marks of time, just like the gentleman bears riddles, the marks of a lifetime.

I took a snap, looked at my camera, then back at the wall, and left. Today all those pieces are probably gone, replaced by others but I have my jpeg, forever, like a trophy waiting to be mounted. Recently, Dutch designer Lilian Van Dongen Torman contacted me regarding a project she was working on. Lilian and Janne Ettwig, who is doing her PhD thesis on cognitive Psychology, created a board game around street art. It is a memory game like the all-time classic except the pictures are of urban artwork. Lilian had seen a photograph I took of Boxi’s piece - a man staring afar, alone looking lonely - and wanted to use it for the cover, which I accepted, honoured.

As it turns out, the game is very much like my hunt in the streets of Amsterdam and of elsewhere. You pick a card, return it. If you see a black and white animal carcase on an entire wall it should be a ROA. If it is an electric box pretending to be a full size apartment complex, it certainly is an EVOL. Now the trick is to find the other piece by the same artist. The game will help you develop the hunter instincts you will need to face the streets and open your mind to a world of wonderment. Because after all, it’s all but (a) game!